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You Have to Keep It Clean

Running a business requires organization maintenance. One important but easily overlooked factor within any work environment is cleaning. No, not tidying up the books, but actually cleaning the areas where you and your staff get your job done. For businesses in the restaurant industry, health standards dictate that cleaning must be done daily, but who should be doing it?

Basically, you have two choices: your staff or an outside contractor. To many, having staff members clean the workplace seems like a no brainer. Workers can devote what seems like a little bit of their time to tidying up, or outright scrubbing (depending upon your workplace), and money can be saved on a cleaning service. You know who to go to in the event that something is not cleaned to your standards, and you can avoid the fees charged by a cleaning service or staffing company. But have you really fully evaluated the costs versus the benefits of hiring a cleaning service? Tracking their charges is easy: you look at the bottom of the invoice. But can you track what you lose when you assign your staff to clean your space?

Outsourcing Is a Good Idea

Even if you break up the responsibility of cleaning an office or restaurant kitchen among multiple staff members, you might be losing out. If your staff is scrubbing a floor or cleaning a bathroom, they aren’t calling on customers, making sure paperwork gets filed correctly, or even getting extra prep work done for the busy weekend you have coming up. This means you are either not getting your core tasks completed or risking paying overtime so your staff can finish both their jobs and the cleaning.

Additionally, you might be hurting morale. People who apply to work in one position do not want to be told that they are also the cleaning crew. Even in the restaurant industry where getting your hands dirty is expected, cleaning bathrooms is not. Making staff break from their core job functions and clean will cause some employees to feel degraded, even bitter. Once this happens, you can expect a shoddy cleaning job followed by some poorly performed core job functions. All of these negative factors can be avoided by contacting a cleaning service or better yet, a competent staffing company that can provide staff to clean on a scheduled basis.

If you outsource the cleaning, you help your business stay focused. When employees have to work in several different aspects of the business, they tend to produce less quality work. It is not because they are lazy or do not care, but if a person has to shift focuses multiple times per day, it becomes hard to get into a groove and concentrate on being successful. You might be losing out on some creative ideas and extra attention to detail if you decide to have your staff come off task at certain times of the week in order to clean.

This argument works for literally every industry. It is better to have employees focused on a particular set of tasks. Cooks should worry about cooking and maintaining a clean workstation, and mail room clerks should be on top of properly distributing mail and delivering messages. It might seem like a good idea to reassign a lower-level employee to cleaning, but in the end it is almost always a bad one. Once you realize how cost effective outsourcing can be, especially in combination with better morale and productivity of your core staff, you will see that it is actually an investment that pays out.